Going Down Hopping

Although as a child I was blissfully unaware of the fact, the hop gardens of Kent were always under threat from the air. When the annual picking season resumed again post World War Two, the menace did not come from a lone German bomber making his way home thankful and exhausted, but from flocks of local birds elated to witness the re-establishment of one of their favourite food sources. It wasn’t just people who suffered under the years of Adolf Hitler’s aerial bombardment.

The growers themselves were only too keen to return to hops and the thousands of willing pickers were overjoyed or as Old Nan said, Tickled Pink! Once the news filtered through to Uncle Harold who had for the latter part of the nineteen thirties been charged with making the annual booking at the farm in Mereworth, a celebratory drink was organised at The Jolly Farmers in Crayford, just a hop, skip and a jump from where most of the Constants then lived and a 480 bus ride for us. The general jubilation at the time makes today’s almost complete absence of the hops a more woeful situation than it possibly needs to be because change is in the nature of things.

Last time I was in Kent, several years ago now, there was not a hop to be seen though we made a determined search of all the places previously associated with that tall climbing perennial. In our hired Honda we drove through each of the villages I recalled from my childhood ending up at Old Nan’s much loved Mereworth fondly recalled from her own earliest years, but the hops and all that had been associated with them had gone. Even the local pubs, all heavily decorated with hops on the bine just a year or two previously, now behaved as if the plant whose seasonal workers had supported them readily and raucously over decades had barely existed.

A visit to Shepherd Neame Brewery in Faversham which dates back as far as 1698 revealed the astonishing fact that recently this most distinguished Kent beer maker has actually taken to importing its hops from New Zealand. We were then perplexed and stunned into silence. As far as we were aware no hops were being grown in the North Island where anywhere from Auckland to Kaitaia is considered semi-tropical. Later it was explained to us that they are grown in the Tasman area in the upper South Island where generally the climate is more like Southern England with cold winters sometimes leaning towards snow. Hops, apparently need the cold in order to best thrive and New Zealand hops an earnest young man revealed, were infinitely superior to anything that had ever been produced locally. I found that hard to believe as of course any true Kentish maid would, but decided not to challenge him.

It turned out to be quite correct that apparently notable hops, increasingly in demand from those describing themselves as Craft Beer makers emerge triumphantly from the Nelson region. Not without incident because at one time they were also under threat from the Yellow Crowned Parakeet, the Kakariki whose ongoing attacks upon them in the nineteenth century made serious inroads into their potential survival. Thankfully for Nelson Hop Growers and for the Shepherd Neame Brewery those days are well and truly in the past and it is now the Kakariki itself whose survival is threatened. I found myself wondering what reprisals were taken all those years ago by the South Island farmers. Did the thought of those predatory parakeets keep them awake at night? Was it slingshots at dawn throughout the growing season?

The county of Kent was for several centuries synonymous with the now almost non-existent hop plant, the pungently aromatic essential for beer making with the mysterious Latin name of humulus lupulus - or Wolf of the Woods. Pliny the Elder, famed as a naturalist, gives one of the very first references to the plant and describes it as the Willow Wolf because where hops were found among willows their twining growth proved as destructive as a wolf in a flock of sheep. Making their way up tall supporting wooden poles they grow to five metres, trained in Spring for the journey and reaching the summit in early July when the first of the iconic cones appear. The haunting and all-pervading aroma is unmistakable and never forgotten. They are harvested in September as every ex-picker knows, to be dried in an Oast House prior to being sent on to the breweries.

The very first English hop garden was created in the parish of Westbere near Canterbury in 1520 and so it was that the surrounding areas rapidly became central to the culture due to soil suitability, accessible wood supplies for the poles, charcoal for drying and an already well established and laid out field system. There was now no stopping the hop as traditional English Ale was knocked aside in favour of beer. It was necessary for the crop to be harvested rapidly and it involved a great deal of labour, eventually attracting pickers from far and wide and as time went on increasingly from the East End of London. By the mid sixteen hundreds local farm records were already making mention of the `strangers who come for the hopping’ indicating that the available local labour source was simply inadequate. As the years passed the greater part of this seasonal labour force came from London, supplemented by local Gypsies and at the peak of the industry more than ninety thousand people made their way into Kentish farms at the end of each summer. Working class Londoners now regarded the annual picking season as their country holiday with pay and very much looked forward to the six weeks of rural freedom for months in advance. We were amongst them!

My grandmother’s first memory of Going Hopping down at Mereworth went back to 1890 when she was a pre-schooler living in Stepney, East London during winter months and under a tarpaulin in the fields of Kent as soon as the pea picking season started in early June. She was never happier than in the hop gardens and the tradition was carried on by her daughters ensuring that my mother developed the same loving regard for the cultivation of hops. It was no surprise that along with our numerous cousins my brother and I also regarded Going Down Hopping as a holiday not easily surpassed by mere boarding houses in Ramsgate or camping grounds in Swalecliffe as I have described elsewhere. In my mother’s case her dedication to hops is not altogether surprising as she was actually born in the hop gardens of Mereworth in 1908 causing perpetually harassed Old Nan to pause in the day’s picking for at least an hour or two. What now seems hard to accept is that by the time of her birth the amount of local land reserved for the plant had fallen to approximately half of that involved twenty five years earlier. A little later during the First World War brewing was to be considerably reduced and to avoid a huge surplus government restrictions were put in place to further control the industry and they remained in place until the mid 1920s. Hard times for growers followed featuring not only the depression but surplus hops, low prices and a worrying disease called Hop Downy Mildew.

In 1932 the Hops Marketing Board was created with members elected annually and thereafter monopoly control ensured a sheltered market for producers. A further Golden Age was emerging for Hop Pickers, one that was eventually to propel me and my brother into our own cherished corner of it. Going Down Hopping was always the highlight of our year and during the last few days of August we gathered at the station in Gravesend early on the designated Sunday morning for the Hop Pickers’Special from London Bridge. It was always already crowded by the time it reached us because back then whole families linked together for the season, hundreds of men, women, children some with their pet dogs and caged canaries from the crowded slums of the East End.

From Maidstone we boarded lorries sent out from the farms, walking the last half mile of farm track to the huts with their primitive narrow bunks and piles of sacks and wheat straw to fill them with. Making the mattresses was the first job and allocated to the older children, in our case led by my cousins Margaret, Harold and Leslie. My grandmother, mother and aunts maintained that the huts were a giant step forward as far as comfort was concerned as their own memories were of camping under tarpaulins in the corner of a field where the Gypsies with their vans had far more exclusive and certainly much envied accommodation. Local villagers were naturally enough wary of us and their children were warned not to play with us. Shopkeepers were of the opinion that we were not to be trusted and some pubs even had signs outside advising: No Hoppers & No Gypsies. This was a situation we became accustomed to and after a while no longer cared very much about. We were Untouchables and that was good enough for us – we were happy Untouchables. The farmers themselves at least were pleased to see us and records show that particular families visited the same gardens through several generations. As a group we were reliable and we worked with enthusiasm.

It was customary for whole families to work around one bin together, adults had over time dexterously developed a technique to pluck each hop cone individually with middle finger and thumb at great speed. Old Nan, by far the best of the Constant’s pickers could strip the length of a bine in a single action and said that she had been even more adept in the days of the Old Pole System when the poles themselves were uprooted with the bines attached and laid across the bin. The new-fangled method of pulling down the bine with a binman’s hook was to her mind quite inferior and slowed progress. My youngest cousins, too small to reach the top of the bin squatted in the rows and picked into a shared, open umbrella. A large family of good pickers such as our own might do well each adult earning as much as three or four pounds a week by the dawn of the 1950s. Living expenses were low and some pay was kept back until the conclusion of the season ensuring that each picker would, as my mother put it, last the distance and not skidaddle. Some farms paid a proportion of earnings each week in tokens which could be spent in local shops and public houses. This system was popular with the children because it was infinitely easier to coax a token or two out of a nearby adult than actual hard cash.

In 1931 George Orwell and a friend, disguised as tramps, spent a week hop picking at a farm near Maidstone and managed to earn a mere nine shillings with which he was not impressed. A year or two later Whitbread’s largest garden at Beltring was described as providing ideal conditions for their workers. Hot and cold water was available adjacent to the huts, the sanitary arrangements were excellent and drunkenness and swearing was reported to the manager who kept a Black Book which effectively controlled the several thousand pickers each year. Nobody wanted a transgression recorded and perhaps become in danger of expulsion from the gardens!

The idyllic annual holiday in the country never lost its popularity regardless of those critics like Orwell who, as one of my cousins sensibly pointed out, could probably afford an alternative such as a week in Brighton in a fancy hotel any time he fancied it. The death knell came with mechanisation. The first picking machine was used in Worcestershire before the war, and they became steadily more popular as time went on. Some farmers were opposed to them saying machine picked hops were more difficult to dry, settling in the kiln unevenly. However, in the final years of hand picking in the 1950s pay was two shillings and sixpence a bushel as opposed to machine picked fourpence a bushel. Economics eventually justified the change.

By the time I left Wombwell Hall School in 1956 Going Down Hopping had become a thing of the past a fact that was greatly lamented. When I was last in the Kent countryside in the hired Honda it seemed that the Hop Farms themselves had also vanished. Once back in New Zealand I learned that perhaps my search had not been diligent enough and that near Faversham the Clinch Family of Syndale Farm have been growing hops for three hundred years, one of only seven growers left in the South East. Even more astonishingly they still employ hand pickers, although a mere fifteen or twenty of them at each harvest and usually they are locals. Lucky Locals my mother would undoubtedly say!

Only recently I learned that there were a number of differing plant varieties. Ella was both floral and spicy and mostly used in lagers and pilsners. Helga was more delicate with subtle herbal overtones, best for ales. Topaz was the most adaptable with pronounced grassy flavours. Cascade was described as having fruity characteristics. I think I might favour Enigma, a relative newcomer which is described as having raspberry and red currant tones, somewhat tropical. I now wonder which would have most attracted those flocks of plundering birds as they gathered each dawn for the day’s raiding and looting.